If you’re not using live streaming to engage and connect with your followers, then you might be missing out on some great business. The numbers behind live streaming are impressive, and if you’re not using it as a marketing tool, you should be incorporating this medium into your marketing strategy at the earliest.
What Is Live Streaming?
Live streaming is a simple process of connecting with your target audience that can drive big results. It is a powerful way to engage with your audience and personalize your message in a unique way that resonates with them. By using your social media reach, you can stream live to a larger audience and give your followers a sneak peak of your company and products, and it will also tie an emotional knot with them.
The use of live streaming has been expanded with the rise of different social media apps providing users with options of live videos, with the market increasing from $30 billion in 2016 to an expected value of $70 billion in 2021 and $184 billion by 2027.
That’s tremendous growth, and this fact is forcing marketers to take it seriously, and a huge number is ready to inculcate live streaming in their marketing strategy.
Why Your Company Should Be Using Live Streams
Live streaming allows audiences to interact with your content in real time. It is a great way to give your audience a genuine and personalized way to consent with your brand. Through live streaming, your audience gets a chance to see the faces and voices behind the brand that drive brand association and loyalty.
When it comes to the reasons your company should be using live streams, the numbers speak for themselves.
You need to have a look at these statistics by techjury:
- 96% of people say they’ve watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
- With over 9.3 billion hours watched, Twitch is now the biggest live streaming platform worldwide.
- 79% say a brand’s video has convinced them to buy a piece of software or an app.
- The live streaming market will be worth over $247 billion by 2027.
- Videos on social media generate 1200% more shares than texts and images.
- Companies that use video enjoy 41% more traffic from searches.
- 40% of consumers state video increases the chance to purchase a product on their mobile device.
- 74% of millennials find video helpful when comparison shopping.
Live streaming can create a deeper and stronger connection of your followers with your brand, and if you already have a social media presence, it’s likely you have a platform to leverage it. Furthermore, by monitoring viewer comments and reactions during a livestream event, businesses can gain a deeper understanding and valuable insights about their audience. This information can then be used to craft and tailor future content and marketing strategies.
Which Social Media Platforms Offer Live Streaming?
A great news for businesses that aren’t utilizing live streaming till date is that it doesn’t take a lot to get started. You can easily live stream from platforms you’re already using, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many others. Each platform offers slightly different options and the chance to reach a different audience. If you’ve already got a big following on these platforms, then you can immediately connect with a large audience. If you don’t have a large audience, live streaming can help build your prominent presence.
Facebook Live Streaming
99Firms states that 52% of live streams happen on social media, and Facebook is the most popular with 2.7 billion monthly active users. Facebook Live was launched in 2016, and since then it has made a prominent impact on the platform. Live videos receive 10x more comments than regular videos and 3x longer watch time. This shows the power of live streaming on Facebook, and that is why 42.7% of businesses use live streaming on this platform.
Instagram Live Streaming
Instagram is second most popular, with 1.15 billion active users aged between 18 and 34. It might not be as big as Facebook, but it does allow your business to reach a different demographic in terms of age bracket. Although you’re live streaming from a mobile device, Instagram Live allows you to offer a very personal glimpse into your brand and craft your content according to your audience.
YouTube Live Streaming
YouTube is the original and may be the oldest video-based platform, and today it plays a vital role in live streaming for marketers. It’s second only to Facebook as a social media platform and is considered to be the second biggest search engine in the world after Google, with an active audience of 2 billion monthly users.
LinkedIn Live
With more than 766 million users across the globe, LinkedIn is a powerhouse for marketing and networking. It’s an ideal way to reach, especially for users in sales or B2B. LinkedIn Live is available for both members and pages and receives an impressive seven times more reactions and 24 times as many comments than any video posts. You just need to make sure that your videos are appropriate for LinkedIn’s more professional audience.
Amazing Tools and Tips to Optimize Engagement with Your Live Streams
There are lots of tools that can help you optimize your live streaming. What’s important before using these tools is to not go crazy and sign up for lots of subscriptions, but to do your homework and find the package that best suits your business and comes into your budget.
To make it more simple for you, here are some of our favorite live streaming tools.
Restream.io
If you were thinking, “It’s great there are so many platforms to live stream on, but what if I can use them all simultaneously?” then Restream.io is your best buddy.
When it comes to live streaming, Restream allows you to stream to over 30 social media platforms at the same time. You can schedule your live streams and pre-recorded videos, engage your viewers through chat, and bring all your analytics together in one place. The best thing about Restream is that it is too simple to get set up and start streaming.
Social Media Scheduling Tools for Promotion
To get the best results out of your live streams, you need to reach as large an audience as possible. To do this, you’ve got to build your following and make sure you promote your live videos. You also need to be consistent with your social media, and the easiest way to do this is by using scheduling tools. You still have to create great content, but at least with these tools, you can schedule your posts without having a headache.
While Restream is here to help you with videos, tools such as Hootsuite, SocialPilot, and Buffer can help make you stay consistent with your other social media posts. All you need to do is sync your accounts, and then you can immediately post to each platform and schedule all your content. This can help you engage a large audience and huge following who are eager to interact with you, which is perfect for your live streams.
Image Creation Tools
If you’re going to use low-quality posts to promote your live stream, all your efforts are going to waste, and you will not get the required results. Research shows that posts with relevant visual content get 94% more views than content strategies without it, and this is where you need custom images.
Tools such as Canva allow you to create wonderful images and edit them to perfectly connect with your audience. You can add text, filters, and other design elements to grab your target audience’s attention and make them wait for your future live streams.
Video Editing Tools
You can also save your live streams for future use. Once you’ve saved a live stream, you can use it like any other video and incorporate it into your marketing strategy. Once you saved your video, you might see that it needs mild edits. When you’re no longer live, you can edit and control how you want to present your video. And you can easily do it with video editing tools such as Lumen5 and WeVideo. You can add extra graphics to make points clearer and format your video according to your needs. This allows you to repurpose your live streams and make sure you’re getting more benefit from them.
Equipment You’ll Need for Great Live Streaming
You don’t need to buy any fancy equipment to create an engaging live stream. If you’re streaming to channels like Facebook and YouTube, then all you need is a phone to create catchy content.
If you are producing something on a larger scale, you will need the right equipment. Important things to consider are the quality of your laptop, lighting, camera, and microphones. Audio is a main component of any live stream, so make sure you’ve got microphones that can offer clear, crisp sound.
How to Make Engaging Content for Your Live Stream Videos
Along with a killer marketing strategy, your success is dependent on the quality of your content.
To drive maximum engagement, you need to understand your audience, the questions they have, and the pain points they might be facing. Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, then you can create a rough plan for what you want to achieve with your live stream.
Remember these important points:
- Engage with your audience before you go live and ask them what they would like to see you address. This can guide the theme of your stream and help you to answer people’s questions.
- You need to be prepared so that you feel comfortable. People like live video because it’s not staged and scripted. It’s a sneak peek of you, your brand, and your company, so you need to be flexible.
- Be responsive to comments and feedback, and allow them to guide you.
- The goal of live streaming generally isn’t to advertise your product; it’s about building valuable relationships with your audience and followers. Always be aware of the value you offer the viewer and look to maximize this.
Conclusion
Live streams are gaining rapid popularity, and it’s not by chance; this is a technology with an amazing ability to engage targeted audiences and boost your marketing. It’s important to remember it’s not just the live stream that matters. To make the most of these tools, you need to be focused on growing your following, and this requires innovative social media marketing.
Live streaming is a powerful tool to work into your social media marketing plan, and it can help expand your brand’s profile, so it’s time to embrace it.
If you need to know more about social media marketing, stay connected with The Mighty Apes. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a prominent social media presence and a creative strategy to increase your following for a successful brand.
